Apostolis Fotiadis
Greece at the beginning of 2011
The beginning of 2011 found Greek society and its political system fighting with the ramifications brought about by the structural adjustment plan initiated by the agreement of Greece with IMF and its European partners in May 2010.
The structural adjustment plan like IMF has admitted itself was a copy paste of other austerity mechanisms implemented in Latin American and Eastern European countries mostly during the 90s. It was basically aiming to fiscal consolidation through tough spending cuts and heavy horizontal taxation. Consequently after half a year of rapid implementation only economic recession was already hitting hard major economic sectors like construction and third sector services.
Organised social movements had already reacted in various cases, especially through large unionized activity in days of general strikes without serious outcome. Throughout 2010 violent riots have been a standard side effect of large deconstruction, mostly by people participating in spontaneous Black Block’s appearances and stand offs with riots police forces. This was the heritage of 2008 events that followed Alexis Grigoropoulos murder by a police officer in Exarxia, the hub of anarchist and radical leftist activity, which quickly pushed into politics and rapidly radicalized a generation of youngsters. Such a riot has provoked the death of three people working for Marfin Bank in May 2010, during the biggest demonstration of the last decade, the days before the initial bailout agreement with IMF.
While it remains still unclear who committed the crime, given that it is informally proven that various parastatal and other interest groups often highjack riots, the event has frozen the reaction of public opinion and caused a submissiveness that lasted up to the end of 2010. A cohesive block of media, political and business interests has meanwhile orchestrated an ideological agenda to support the structural adjustment plan, which initially focused on quickly reducing the deficit by taxing the middle class, and rapidly deregulating the labour market in order, according to the neo-liberal justification, improve competitiveness.
A year of neo-liberal deconstruction begins violently
The implementation of harsh neo-liberal policies has gone hand in hand with the increased use of police force against organized social reaction. This was already evident at the beginning of the year after the brutality police demonstrated in a demo at the beginning of Dec 15th 2010. Police authority’s abuses already in the last few months of 2010 had begun to raise concerns among the public as well as within professional medical circles.
On Dec. 6, following riot violence, dozens of injured students were admitted to Evagellismos Hospital, located in the heart of the city. Panos Papanikolaou, a neurosurgeon from the Medical Union of Athens, remembered that day because so many injured pupils were admitted that the hospital had to open its emergency quarters. “At least 45 people were seen in emergency units around Athens," Papanikolaou remembered. “Injuries were more and severer than before. Some people are not only beaten with batons, blows and kicks, but assaulted on the head with fire extinguishers police carry with them to blow off Molotov cocktails” ha said. During the first months of 2011 in addition to physical injuries, specialised doctors have witnessed an increase in the number of people seeking medical attention as a result of encountering tear gases and other chemicals. Olga Kosmopoulou, a specialist in infectious diseases, says that chemical methods of crowd control employed by police are leading to increased incidences of skin, eye, and respiratory problems caused by the toxic substances. Police violence and chemicals abuse have become concerning issues even for human rights organisations like Amnesty International. Another indication has been the deterioration on the frequency with which plainclothes police officers showed up in hospitals in order to identify beaten demonstrators and intimidate them in an effort to discourage retribution.
In addition to attacks against the citizenry, some members of riot police units are turning against journalists that cover incidents of abuse. The first case that attracted attention was that of Aris Messinis, an Agence France-Presse photographer in Athens, which alleged that he was the victim of a targeted attack on Nov. 17 2010 during a major demonstration commemorating the fall of a military junta. During 2011 photojournalists have been directly targeted by police on the street, obliging their union leader Marios Lolos to directly accuse the responsible ministry, in a couple of press conferences, for covering up such incidents of riot police “trying to hide the abuses in which they are involved”.
The Reporters Without Borders team visited Athens in the summer of 2011 to investigate the reasons behind the country’s decline in media freedom ratings. Greece fell sharply in the 2010 World Press Freedom index, ending up last in Europe in the 70th place (in the 2009 ranking it was in the 35th place), together with Bulgaria. Accounting for this worrying trend, the report concludes, is mainly the economic and financial crisis which exposed the weaknesses and malpractices of a defective media market which has been for years artificially supported.
The major question posed by analysts and human rights activists coming in contact with indication of deteriorating repression of media freedoms was whether this was the result of lost control by police, or a conscious choice for mounting suppression while austerity increased social turbulence.
Two important moments for the social movements in Greece
January would bring about two important cases of social reaction on the field of general administration and migration policy. The first was the hunger strike of 300 migrants that arrived to Athens from Crete and attempted to shut themselves in the law faculty in Athens. Initial negative reaction has isolated the migrants and political organizations that found refuge in an old antic building in the center of Athens. From there and for over a month they fought against negative publicity and a hostile public opinion and in the end managed to negotiate their way out. Without winning any of the maximalist aims they initially claimed but with shifting for the first time the migration policy agenda from the xenophobic discourse that dominated the issue in 2010 to a more pragmatic one about the challenges migration posed on Greek society. Unfortunately those gains would fade away very quickly. Under the pressure of austerity and with prospects of quality life diminishing rapidly in the center of Athens an anti-migrant breakout of the Greek public opinion is provoked on May 2011 because of the murder of a 44 year old Greek by three migrants attempting to rob him. Anti-migrant pogroms, high jacked by extreme right wing organizations, swept through Athens and other cities, attacks that in their majority remained unanswered by authorities and alter permanently the relation of Athenian with foreigners for the coming months and years.
The second event has been the popular revolt of the people residing in the outskirt of Athens named Keratea, against the planning of a garbage collection and depot point in their area. Keratea begun as a local argument between residents and civil authorities but was transformed into a symbolic standoff of independent citizens and political organizations against police forces that spent over four months violently confronting each other outside the village. The amount of attention and solidarity Keratea people attracted is unprecedented in modern Greek history and given that plans for installing the collection point have been postponed a somewhat victorious one. More important is that in this case people involved attempted a complete response to a coercive policy, from the field point where they resisted what they saw as oppressive state force, up to the judicial level where they tried to take on the government in the courts. Information campaigns let people understand the impact of organized business interest on waste management policy, investigative independent journalism exposed how the government collaborate in favor of great project contractors against the interests of citizens, and finally a big ‘Art Resistance Festival’ situated right between the village and the state forces proclaiming wide solidarity towards marked the memory of Keratea, as an event where well organized citizens have been able to face and stop the state machinery.
Both the Keratea case and the 300 hundreds hunger strike have been events where people voluntary have participated in solidarity political actions in order to achieve a specific aim against state authority. No matter the gains of those attempts they have set into place an innovative perspective about participation and political action that until then inhabited only the rooms of liberal anarchist groups as a theoretical issue or had found little practice in small political projects. The spirit of this en mass political mobilization, affected in debt by the wide delegitimisation of the Greek political system, would inspire a different approach to politics that would for the first time crystallize in the movement of ‘Greek Indignados’ that took over Syntagma square during June 2011.
The people’s square
The mass mobilization on central squares of other European capitals, which introduced the spirit of popular Arab revolts from the Magreb countries, into Europe, arrived in Athens late. Greeks were so much destructed from their own troubles and political dogfights that failed to see anything innovative in the popular but peaceful uprising of Europeans. In the beginning some people took the initiative through Facebook to invite for the take over of the Syntagma (Constitutional) Square. Many others dismissed the idea arguing that after so much violent riots failing to stop neo liberal politics a peaceful movement would be hopeless anyway. It took only a few days before the square was sinking under the burden of a hundred thousand demonstrators who returned again and again just to cheer against the gloomy parliament standing on the top of the square and the politicians inside. Then the square took its course into becoming a unique historical moment in modern Greek politics.
The mass gathered at Syntagma Square throughout June offered ground for reflecting on developing responses to the politics of crisis inside Greek society. The crowds where neither homogenous politically nor they coordinated actions or rhetoric’s during the protests. But they projected a cohesion regarding their expressed absolute rejection of mainstream politics. One could observe different scales of involvement as well as different dynamics developing on the square during the weeks of protest.
A crowd more interested in protesting against politicians and the political system in general demonstrated a tendency of gathering and cheering outside the parliament gates. Their slogans commented unpopular political personalities and emphasized their indignation with the corrupted political system. No specific social class was overrepresented in these crowds, which constituted a representative picture of Greek upper to lower middle class and working class people. A cohesive group of right wingers attempted to highjack a place in front of the parliament and give a ‘nationalist’ tone to the political slogans of the crowd. Despite many leftists believed that the process would derail and transform to a nationalist outbreak of rage, people instinctively isolated any radical elements, something proving how alienated mainstream people have become towards social forces over projecting violent behavior lately. Xenophobic slogans or behavior were merely absent from the square which was dominated entirely from references regarding the crisis. Other subjects related to feminist emancipation, human rights, citizens’ rights etc. were also remarkably absent from the topics raised around the square, whether in discussions or during demos.
People persisted on two things, the peaceful character of the demonstration and that no organization with a political agenda highjack’s the demonstrations. Animosity towards any form of organized political groups that appeared on the square has been acute and non negotiable, offering arguments to people who attempted to characterize the demonstration for lacking political substance or being exposed to political manipulation by major media and the government.
The rise of direct Democracy
A second large concentration of people gathered on the lower part of the square where it established a camp and engaged in the making of a community that dealt with all short of administrative issues. While days past this community which was represented every evening at 8 by an open assembly that lasted several hours found itself engaging in a real experiment of how to practice direct democracy, something that transformed on its major political demand and some cases mantra while the month approached to an end. People involved in the community and assembly organized cultural, political and social activities like introductory seminars on finance and economics, concerts, solidarity actions to strikers, a free kitchen, a cleaning team, a media group that to an extent managed to get the voice of the assembly to the public without being manipulated by big media. Those activities produced administrative challenges and offered an opportunity to many ‘beginners’, if one may say, to formulate an understanding of the challenges posed by the practice of politics. During participation in the assembly or activities people encouraged each other to get involved equally and don’t accept roles of leaders and leaded. Even though those have informally existed the central idea was that everyone on the square is equal and that power is exercised only after consensus. Those led many times to contradictions between theory and practice and created disagreements on which people struggled to compromise. Some theoretical weakness of the claim for direct participatory democracy appeared during that month and pushed further the debate on the issue. This was enhanced by the invitations the assembly sent to academics and intellectuals like the popular economist Giannis Varufakis, the constitutional lawyer Giorgos Katrugalos, the ex JP Morgan annalist Dimitris Kazakis and others which discuss with people about the austerity measures, the debt crisis and its political implications.
The big moment of the square
Not only by coincidence the square reached its prime in participation and political activity while the days for the vote of an interim austerity package on the 28 and 29th at the Greek parliament approached. The Troika demanded that the parliament ratified a program of odious taxes and spending cuts which have arranged public opinion upon announcement a month ago. Otherwise the next bailout loan money would not arrive in Athens. The assembly discussed extensively about its response to the vote and finally a decision was made to attempt a blockade of the parliament during those days. While the day approached amidst a polarized climate and given the violent past of demonstration on the square people expected two dramatic days. And so it was. The government mobilized an enormous police force and stopped public transportation to the square in an effort to discourage participation in the demos. Still tens of thousands showed up on the spot and were joined by the crowds of the Unions demos that arrived later during the day on the square. The confrontation that followed turned increasingly violent, with riot police forces attempting an evacuation of the square by the excessive use of force and CS gas. The videos and pictures that remain from these two days, material produced by eye witnesses, are proof that the spirit of solidarity and the cohesion achieved during June at the assembly was something more than just talk. People suffered aggression and attacks that are beyond the legitimate limits of a democratic regime exercising its monopoly on violence and to some extent legitimized the claim of many in Greece that blamed the government for authoritarianism. The government barely survived the tension of those days. The scale of violence exposed the lack of legitimacy Papandreou’s government suffered that forced the PM to attempted an exodus by visiting the President and offering his resignation as long as a national coalition government took the burden of ratifying the legislation necessary to guarantee that Greece would kept receiving bailout money.
The square was about to achieve an enormous victory able to galvanize the movement and crystallize it as a historical achievement, to take on a government and forestall, even so temporarily, the advance of neo-liberalist policy in the country. High rank members of PASOK interrupted Papandreou’s exodus and gathered quickly the fading support among the ranks of PASOK MPs in order to vote in the austerity package. Despite failing on their ultimate task, to stop the legislation, people felt that keeping the square and going on with the assembly had been a victory against police and the government. Still with the coming of August the majority of people abandoned the square which soon started decaying towards an irrelevant gathering of anti-mainstream individuals without any specific content.
Greek Crisis Reverberates Again throughout the World
Autumn brought more of the umbrella union’s general strikes still after a winter of discontent and ruthless confrontation with neo liberal forces people seemed to have lost the initiative. The political crisis unfolding in Athens at the end of October was more the product of internal power struggles and the fatigue of the political system than of social reaction. The narrow international credibility left to the country and its political system was fading dangerously, lettings its citizens wander what the future holds. One of those nights while walking through an empty ‘Constitutional’ square facing the parliament Dimitris Pagoulatos, employed by an insurance company that forced him to accept a 20 percent reduction on his wage during the summer, and preparing to pay an amount over 1000 Euros in emergency taxes broad up by this government from July to September, was describing how he has not been more pessimistic in his life ever before. “We listen to all those developments and think how detached from our reality those people inside the parliament are. We and them live in two different worlds” he narrated. “Those are dangerous times and we live through them without hope for tomorrow. It feels if like collective paranoia has dominated this society”.
Despite the financial incapacity and increasing international isolation of the country regarding its stance on the evolving debt crisis, Greece, by an irony of fate, was still holding in its hands tremendous power. The move of Papandreou to call a referendum on the decisions of Oct 27th 2011 Brussels summit about the Greek debt crisis has brought Greece, the country’s European membership, and the future of the monetary Union staring into the abyss.
On 27th of Oct. European leaders left from the Belgian capital feeling they had agreed on the best possible weaponry against the debt crisis. This is what George Papandreou announced upon his arrival in Greece the same day bracing his compatriots for further sacrifices in exchange of a 50 percent slash of Greek debt achieved with the assistance of major European partners who coerced bankers in accepting so big losses. The euro-zone member states also agreed to boost the impact of the euro backstop fund, the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), to around €1 trillion ($1.4 trillion).
Upon his return to Greece, Papandreou unpredictably decided to ask for a democratic approval of this deal from the Greek people. Immediately Merkel and Sarkozy summoned the Greek premier in Cannes, where the G20 have been holding their regular meeting, and made clear to him that a referendum could only address the answer whether Greeks still want to stay with their partners Euro zone or not. They also warned that Greece will not get more bailout money until it becomes clear it will adhere to all measures agreed on Oct. 27th in Brussels. The country’s cash reserves, according to the Finance Minister, would last up to Dec 15th. During the last two years of the debt crisis there has been no more obvious blackmail attempt to coerce a country accepting the austerity recipe of the European Commission the ECB and the IMF. The democratic deficit of Brussels and the coercive nature of the “Merkozi” axon were exposed more than ever.
With an explicit threat to get kicked out of the eurozone and bankruptcy hanging over the country Papandreou rushed back to Athens to face a full blown mutiny among the ministerial and MP ranks of his party. He spent some days fighting for political survival. After resisting pressures inside his party to submit his resignation and having abandoned the referendum idea, he asked for a confidence vote tonight in exchange for his resignation afterwards and the formation of national unity government.
The thriller unfolding in Athens was reverberating throughout the world sending stock markets sliding down. The Euro currency dropped 7,5, while the European Central Bank has thrown over 500 million Euros into the markets in order to stop a crisis contagion to other Southern European partners. Ironically the international bookmaker William Hill was putting the odds on a country leaving the euro by the end of 2012 at 11-10.
On demand of its international partners Greece had produced a coalition government joined by the two major traditional parties New Democracy and Pasok as well as the extreme right wing LAOS in order to secure that the Troika wouldn’t pull the plug on Greece. An acknowledged banker, Loukas Papademos, was invited to lead the new government and help the country implement its commitments in order to secure further international support in order to escape the looming default.
A Sad Moment for the Cause of Social Movements
While the system struggled to achieve a sensitive balance the supporters of leftist parties and the anarchist black block occupied again the Syntagma square. This time though cohesion was not achieved and the huge tension degenerated into a brutal confrontation between members of the Black Block and the Communist Union PAME. Greece is one of the last European countries where a traditional Soviet styled Communist party attracts about 8 percent of the electorate. It is a party with well organised structures and well established bonds with the leftovers of the working class in the industrial base of the country. The animosity between anarchists and communists goes back many decades and has historical and ideological dimensions. But the picture of people brutally attacking each other sent a very demoralising message to a large majority attending the demonstration. Police failed to intervene and control the crowds in this case, claiming that the leadership of the Communist party asked it not to. The idea that communist leader coordinated their street tactics with police officers was another negative point to this story. For many, who imagined that street politics have been more complicated that just a confrontation of world visions and ideologies, this would remain an awakening moment. Greek political history and the history of social movements in the country are indeed complicated and are characterised by a bitter internal struggle among the so called progressive forces. This is very well reflected on antagonisms between left leaning parliamentary parties as well as the inability of those forces to unite forces in projecting alternative political tasks. In the end of 2011 opinion polls shown the leftist parliamentary parties received around 30 percent of the electorate. Still the fragmentation among them dismisses any chance that they could formulate a serious political alternative that in combination with the enlarging social movements could challenge directly neo-liberal forces. This is something that will be proven costly in the years to come for Greek society.
Industries collapse, workers organise
End of 2011 illustrated a dire situation for the Greek economy. Recession has climbed at 6 percent and statistical unemployment is beyond 19 percent. Real one is much higher with youngsters up to 34 years old being hit the hardest with half of them being shut out of the labour market. This stark picture combines with the economic collapse of many businesses and an aggression on the side of the ones surviving which attempt to limit wage expenses and deregulate their employment standards further. In this was the steel industry ‘Xalivourgia’ at the end of November released 50 workers and asked from the rest to reduce working hours during the week for less money. The steel workers of ‘Xalivourgia’ shut down the plant and went on a long strike which still lasts, now over 60 days. The solidarity to them from all social levels in symbolic and material terms has been considerate in order to take on the company and this despite the veil of silence by major media that left the strike unnoticed from the public in the beginning. Still the workers of ‘Xalivourgia’ have lost a major ally in their struggle. The workers of the company’s twin plant in Volos, a central continental Greek urban centre, have agreed on terms with the company and kept working despite the attempts of their colleagues in Athens to persuade them join the strike. Thus their struggle has been led in a deadlock with the company, with both waiting to see who will last longer. The fate of problematic big newspaper publication has been different. ‘Eleftherotupia’ a historical centre leftist publication and ‘Ependytis’ a popular weekly publication have shut down during the Christmas holidays. Letting more than 1000 extra unemployed and a huge burden of debt obligations unobserved. Workers in both companies tried for months to resist the closures but have not managed to provide serious alternative business plans to keep them open. Truth is that in such negative economic conditions bringing about innovative political ideas is not an easy task. The fate of many more similar but smaller companies is the same.
End of the year, beginning of the biggest attack on labour market value and working rights
After two years of constant confrontation with anti-labour deregulation Greek workers are now going to face the most serious attack on their rights. And none can be about an optimistic response from organised collective bodies on their behalf. Unions, already demoralised and ineffective have lost a lot of their power. Strikes haven’t been always very successful and in case of major cases it has been difficult to crystallise gains. Working rights have faced a stampede of irregularities and labour market deregulation has been the only thing Greek governments have been loyal to last year. As Christina Kopsini, a major working law and labour market analists says, ‘the only measures predicted in the austerity packages that have been implemented without delays at all have been the ones deregulating the labour market and abolishing basic rights occurring from labour law’. During 2001 the ex Minister of Labour Louka Katseli had lengthy negotiations with Troika for the introduction of legislation that gave force to company contracts at the expense of sectror’s collective contracts. Thus giving extra power to employers and diminishing negotiating powers on the workers side. She later admitted that she followed this way in order to stop the Troika from putting up for negotiation with the Greek state more important issues like the National Collective Contract. Now it seems she failed, after having been politically isolated during the summer.
The Troika is returning prepared for another blackmail connecting the next bailout loan with measures that essentially target the National Collective Contract and minimum wages. Those include the reduction of wages in the private sector and the abolition of the 13th and 14th wage bonuses in order to advance further the internal devaluation. In the absence of an independent currency policy in which devaluation would be a feasible option for Greece to regain competitiveness, devaluation of labour market value is the only alternative for the Troika. They seem to believe that self-regulation of the markets will do the rest, ignoring that the attack on working rights is directly connected to increasing recession and reduction of national GDP.
What the Troika is doing in fact is to destroy any mechanism of capital redistribution and enforcing devaluation on labour market value that will reduce incomes of Greeks among the lowest in Europe. It is uncertain if workers are able to react effectively on this attack. Unions are confused and have been defeated consequently during the last two years, thus suffering serious drawbacks on member’s confidence. Workers are broken and survival in the market is becoming increasingly a personal and not a collective effort, something not very difficult to happen in a society that individualist standards have been popularised fro more than 20 years already. Employers have become more determined when pursuing reduction of salary expenses since survival in a climate of unending recession has become a tougher to achieve. Greece has not escaped of a regular or irregular default making people with jobs less demanding and eager to accept wage cuts and loss of working rights. Deregulation will go ahead rapidly while the working class is confused and disoriented. And it is difficult to stay optimistic in such a climate.
In need for a quick and accurate response civil society and organised workers will have to search for greater unite on their aims. Savvas Robolis, the head of the research institute of GSEE, the biggest labour union in the country, has warned that people should focus on stay united and coordinating action. As said before with organised leftist forces remaining fragmented over ideological or petty political aims. And with independent social movements not having the critical mass and necessary morale to take on the government 2012 won’t be a happy year for social forces in the country. But a big opportunity exists as long as those forces alternate somewhat their perspectives. Greece will be approaching the eventuality of an economic default, orderly or disorderly, this spring. This is at least the estimation of most major players, from faithful market forces like Goldman Sachs, to radical leftist economists. A critical moment will arise then given that the impact of economic collapse will reverberate throughout society and cause major social turbulence.
People, scared or not, will have to make choices regarding the character of this society. Neo Liberal forces will have to break them one last time before crystallising for the years to come their gains of power on the labour market and political power. Greeks, given their volatile political culture and the experience that have accumulated during the last two years, will fight back. Whether this will be an organised response aiming specific gains under a cohesive strategy or will be represented through chaos on the streets of Athens again remains to see. But the observer aside of the general outcomes in the months to come should focus on how details clusters of social activity will behave. Social media activists, very energetic the last two years, are preparing for another turbulent winter. Solidarity structures like the Doctors of the World have engaged with thousands of socially excluded citizens already, offering medical and substance food solidarity to them. While the state abandons sectors of the welfare state those awakened social forces most probably will move inside the picture and try to organise structures and respond to the neo-liberal destruction. Independent citizen forces from below will have a saying in the new picture and can make the difference given that the administrative capacity of centralise power is fading. They will have a role to play, small but critical, and organised leftist forces should attempt them to move in social spaces they control and accommodate their innovative initiatives without controlling them for electoral and petty political gains. Its going to be a fight for tomorrow and despite the pessimism of the days, they way it will be fought is important for the future. This everyone should remember when looking towards Greece during 2012.
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